BACK PAGES:THE 1981 general election was held in the shadow of the H Blocks hunger strikes and the death of Bobby Sands in the North, but there were other ghosts hovering over Taoiseach Charles Haughey's visit to Kilkenny as part of his nationwide tour. Maev Kennedy was there to watch as he came face-to-face with Jim Gibbons, a local Fianna Fáil candidate and former defence minister who had given evidence against Haughey in the 1970 Arms Trial.
Electoral glue unites Gibbons and Haughey
As Charlie Haughey and Jim Gibbons walked side-by-side through the streets of Graiguenamanagh, the trumpets blared and the drums rattled. You couldn’t hear the Fianna Fáil machine running, but its wheels were turning fast.
As the Taoiseach toured the small towns of Kilkenny, the former Minister for Agriculture had scooted on ahead of the cavalcade to meet and welcome him to Mooncoin, Fiddown and Piltown.
But when the Taoiseach spoke from the platform at Thomastown, calling for support for the five Carlow-Kilkenny candidates, Jim Gibbons was the only one missing. Tongues wagged.
Last night they did speak on the same platform, reportedly for the first time in 11 years.
Charles J Haughey performed his famous trick of letting all emotion and expression drain from his face as Jim Gibbons, dropped from his cabinet when he came to power, was cheered to the echo.
Gibbons spoke very quietly, very low-key. He said, to cheers, that he was a simple man and he could not understand the Opposition manifestoes. “I am not a pundit but neither, I think you will agree, am I a fool either,” he said. His main interest in politics lay in agriculture, he said. And he dealt with these matters “fairly successfully” in the past, he said to applause. “I may have some ideas which may be of use to my Government in the future in that regard.”
In Graiguenamanagh yesterday afternoon, the sun shone, the band played, the majorettes twirled and stepped, and Jim Gibbons had been waiting smiling when the Taoiseach arrived.
The five candidates and Charlie Haughey marched shoulder-to-shoulder down the hill.
“Ah, but he’s not speaking to him at all at all,” the man behind me said, observing that the Taoiseach was speaking to young Deputy Liam Aylward, on his right hand. At which point the Taoiseach turned to Jim Gibbons and they marched on down the hill in conversation which, if it wasn’t amiable, was a very good imitation of it.
Jim Gibbons was inevitably asked afterwards if all this marching arm-in-arm and sharing of platforms meant the reconciliation of the irreconcilable. “We are fighting this election as a united party,” he said, and would say no more.
Yesterday’s tour was like a royal progress. In every town and village the crowds were waiting half-an-hour before the Taoiseach arrived.
In Callan, that man of many counties found a link for that small Kilkenny town too. It was the birthplace, of course, of Edmond Ignatius Rice, and Charlie, of course, is an old Christian Brothers boy.
A solitary heckler of no discernible political affiliation interrupted his speech. “We welcome the Taoiseach to Callan!” a local worker cried.
“We do not welcome the Taoiseach to Callan”, a heckler cried. A burly garda silenced him by the simple device of clamping his jaws shut with a large hand. The H-Block protesters kept strictly at a distance.
Fianna Fáil lost its Dáil majority in the election: two H-Block prisoners were elected; and Garret FitzGerald became Taoiseach at the head of a short-lived Fine Gael-Labour coalition supported by Independents.